Protesters raise concerns over Enbridge pipeline project and its impact on the Great Lakes

About 50 people gathered Sunday at Elliot Park in Evanston, some with folding chairs, blankets and guitars, to help raise awareness about the dangers of Enbridge’s fossil fuel pipeline project.

Margaret Nelson, a folk singer, opened the event by serenading protesters with an original piece.

“Other planets too cold or hot, better take care of the one we’ve got, that’s what we are going to do,” she sang.

At issue is the replacement of existing pipeline in Minnesota with 340 miles of new pipeline-associated facilities. The $8.2 billion project doubles the capacity of the 1,097-mile-long pipeline, and Canada-based Enbridge claims the modifications have improved safety and environmental protections.

Enbridge’s pipelines cross under both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, and activists are concerned that oil could spill across waterways if the pipes were to rupture, potentially endangering the drinking water of more than 60 million Americans. Some argue that shutting down the Enbridge pipeline would remove the threat of an oil spill altogether.

The coalition hosting the event included 350 Chicago, Chicago Area Peace Action, Citizens’ Greener Evanston, Rise Up Chicago, Save Our Illinois Land, Extinction Rebellion and Rising Tide Chicago. Catherine Buntin of Chicago Area Peace Action said the event’s purpose was to fight to keep watersheds from being poisoned so present and future generations can live.

“We’re already short of water on the planet,” Buntin said. “A lot of the people who work in our groups are parents and grandparents that are very worried about water for their children and their grandchildren.”

On Oct. 7, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not need to weigh how the project as a whole would affect climate change. Kollar-Kotelly said the Army Corps was correct in limiting its environmental review to just the project’s impacts on Minnesota, without considering downstream issues such as greenhouse gas emissions from burning crude oil the pipeline carries.

The decision means approvals have been upheld for Enbridge’s Line 3 oil replacement, which stretches across Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin.

Jessy Bradish, an Evanston resident and activist who spearheaded the event, described it as “an afternoon of activism and community around our beautiful Great Lakes and watershed.”

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“(The pipelines are) oily, they’re full of tar, they put all these cancer-causing chemicals in them that they don’t tell us about and then they put it in the aquifer and make us drink it,” she said.

Barry Feldman with Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement, noted that tar sands oil originates from Canada and flows through Line 3 and Line 5. Tar sands are a mixture of crude oil, asphalt and clay that infiltrate waterways and are hard to remove from the environment.

“If you shut down Line 3 and Line 5, you are limiting the extraction of Canadian tar sands,” Feldman said.

Enbridge’s Line 3 and Line 5 carry more than 23 million gallons of crude oil per day between Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas along the Straits of Mackinac.

“If we really want to save our planet, we have got to ween off of oil and gas,” Buntin said. “To that, we need to put all this taxpayer money into wind and solar transmission lines, and battery storage.”

A cardboard box was passed around for “cash, checks, and good vibes” to go toward the Water Protectors Legal Fund. Last year’s protest raised $12,000.